はじめに日本語
Introduction to Japanese!
Japanese, or nihongo is spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none of them have gained unanimous acceptance. Japanese is an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned in conversation. The language has a relatively small sound inventory, and a lexically significant pitch-accent system. Japanese is a Mora timed language.
The Japanese language is written with a combination of three scripts: modified Chinese chracters called kanji (漢字), and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese Characters is called Hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名) and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名). The Latin alphabet, romaji (ローマ字), is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when entering Japanese text into a computer. Arabic Numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Sino Japanese numerals are also commonplace.
Japanese vocabulary has been heavily influenced loanwords from other languages. A vast number of words were borrowed from Chinese, or created from Chinese models, over a period of at least 1,500 years. Since the late 19th century, Japanese has borrowed a considerable number of words from Indo-European languages, primarily English. Because of the special trade relationship between Japan and first Portugal in the 16th century, and then mainly the Netherlands in the 17th century, Portuguese and Dutch have also been influential.
Grammar
At its core, Japanese grammar is pretty simple, though sentence structures differ greatly from English. For instance, Japanese uses postpositions instead of prepositions (Japan in and not in Japan). It has no gender, declensions or plurals. Nouns never conjugate while adjectives follow a generally standardised conjugation pattern. However, verbs have extensive conjugation patterns and much of Japanese lessons for foreign language learners is about getting these conjugations right. Verbs and adjectives also conjugate by politeness level though, and in a rather peculiar way.
Japanese is a so called agglutinative language, meaning several morphemes which have purely grammatical functions are glued to the end of a word stem to express the grammatical function. The more the intended meaning differs from the basic form of the word, the more morphemes are glued together.
Extra Information:
I am only a level 2 Japanese student in the high school I’m in so I only know a certain amount of Kanji and grammar. if you would like to know your Japanese name or have a Japanese name you want me to call you by please say so. I do not expect anything from you other than to ask questions if you are confused. Is there a certain type of thing you’d like to learn how to say in japanese? Feel free to let me know.
Students/seito:
limes slimes
Konamine
Silver
Carmine
Jay
zombie
Lioslynn
Nemone
PixxieRAWR
Other teachers :
m o r i k k o
The Kaptain
EDIT: if you want me to post a new lesson tell me but until then i wont move on unless everyone is on the same page
biggrin